The doctor removed the shoulder gently. He turned toward Eleanor’s room. “You can stay outside,” he said as he disappeared. “We shall not need you for a while.” And Richard sat down in his parlor on the small sofa and took his tousled head in his hands and held it fast. He may have dozed a little. When he got up and straggled to the kitchen, he found a strange woman making a fire in the range. She had finished polishing off the top of the range and held a black cloth in her hand. The hand was very black, he noticed. He nodded to her and went past her to the door and opened it. The world looked very fresh. The earth and the grass on either side the path were very dark and moist—as if they had been dipped in some curious fluid, and the sky had a kind of luminous quality—swelling with fulness and a freshness of light. Richard More looked up at it and drew in a deep breath—and with the intake he understood, for the first time, that all men see the earth new-washed one morning in their lives. He had a sense of kinship with the earth and with every one living on the earth. When he turned back to the kitchen, the woman was putting the black cloth under the sink. “It’s a girl!” he said. He tried in vain to keep the morning out of his voice. “Glory be to God!” said the woman. She turned promptly and straightened her back and beamed on him. He held out his hand to her and grasped the blackened one. He did not suspect how many young fathers had shaken hands with cooks. His experience was unique. He looked about the kitchen with satisfaction. Ellen Murphy brought some broth and put it on the gas-range. He watched her with kindling eyes. He had been familiar with his kitchen before. But it had not looked to him just as it looked now.... That broth she was heating was for his wife... to keep her alive. He looked at a row of saucepans with intelligent gaze. Ellen Murphy tested the broth and went from the room, carrying it with careful hand. He watched her disappear and looked about the homelike room.... She was going to feed Eleanor. Just outside the door was the ice-box, where he had blundered in the night, breaking up the ice, crushing it for the doctor—they had told him to hurry—hurry!... Ages ago it seemed. And now Eleanor was to have her broth. She was being fed.... Those stew-pans over there were for her. Somehow out of this kitchen, she was to be fed, his baby was being fed—they were all being fed! IX He thrust his hands into his pockets and strolled down the back path to the chicken-yard. He peered through the wire at the strutting fowls. His hair was tousled, there were red rims about his eyes—and he had never felt so alive. The chicken-yard was close to the back fence; on the other side of the fence were chicken-yards that belonged to the houses at the rear.